Apple Crisp

Hello fellow readers,

This is Edwin here. Chelsea has been in Colorado interviewing with Colorado State University. She was really excited and so was I that she got the chance to not only meet with the folks at CSU but also visit Colorado. She's been updating me regularly while teaching (if only my students knew!) It's been a lonely couple of days without my best friend. I haven't been cooking much BUT as a welcome back surprise for Chelsea I am venturing out into unknown territory: desserts! It's been something Chelsea and I have always talked about making. Having all this free time I've researched many recipes and finally decided on 1. It's a recipe for apple crisp. I got the recipe from foodgawker.com and the picture of the recipe led me to another cooking blog. Here is the recipe:

10 cups all-purpose apples, peeled, cored and sliced (I used about 6 Granny Smith apples)
3/4 cup white sugar
1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

2 cups quick-cooking oats
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 cups packed brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup butter, melted
1 cup chopped pecans or walnuts (optional)

Directions
1.Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2.Place the sliced apples in a 9x13 inch pan. Mix the white sugar, 1 tablespoon flour, nutmeg, and ground cinnamon together, and sprinkle over apples.
3.Combine the oats, 2 cups flour, brown sugar, pecans, baking powder, baking soda and melted butter together. Crumble evenly over the apple mixture.
4.Bake at 350 degrees for about 40 minutes.
5. Serve with vanilla ice cream.

It's baking in the oven right now and should be ready by the time Chelsea gets in. This is a very exciting time for both of us. Our commitment to teach in the Valley is coming to a close. While Chelsea was interviewing at CSU I also interviewed with a principal from a charter school in Denver for a 5th grade math position. It would be a great opportunity to continue developing as a teacher, however, it would require me to travel 1 hour and 15 minutes each way every day. School begins at 7 and ends at 5 and I would have to teach 2 Saturdays a month from August to July. I'm not sure if it will be the right move, so stay tuned! Here is a picture of the Apple Crisp from the blog where I got the recipe from.



I hope everyone is enjoying their weekend. Chelsea's plane just landed!!

Don'tcha "GNO" cchi....

Edwin and I accomplished something great today. We got the foam in my latte to be in the shape of a heart!!!!!!! Just kidding, that happened on accident. We made gnocchi, which is a potato dumpling from Italy. As Edwin mentioned in his post earlier today, we had amazing gnocchi last weekend in D.C. and decided to try our own. Instead of writing out the whole recipe, we made a photo montage of the steps we took. This was quite the elaborate process and probably took us 3 hours from start to clean up. Clean-up involved picking up an entire tray of uncooked gnocchi from the floor after I knocked it off the counter. We are pretty impressed with our results.

We started our day with nourishment. Edwin bought a griddle yesterday, and it has significantly improved our quality of life/breakfast. AMAZING! Previously we made pancakes in a saute pan, one at a time. Needless to say, the first pancake was cold by the time we finished making the last one. Not ideal.

We started the gnocchi making process by putting 4 boiled potatoes through a potato ricer. Yesterday we had no idea what a potato ricer was. Today we are the proud owners of one ($8 at Bed Bath & Beyond). Edwin made the connection that this may be how to make hashbrowns- so that may be our next adventure!

After adding beaten eggs and flour to our potato mixture, we kneaded the dough and rolled it into ropes/snakes. (A new haircut is not necessary to make good gnocchi, although it can't hurt)

After making the snakes out of dough, we cut the gnocchi into small pieces and gave them texture by indenting our thumb in one side while imprinting it with a fork on the other. We had 3 trays of this stuff!

Time to cook the little buggers! We put 20 at a time into a pot of boiling water. They rose to the top when done, after about 2 minutes.

After cooking the gnocchi, we added them to a skillet with cremini and portabello mushrooms. The last step was combining the gnocchi and mushrooms with the delicious cream sauce Edwin made. The cream sauce was made with a base of heavy cream (this recipe did NOT come from Cooking Light!!) and vegetable broth. He added 4 oz. gorgonzola cheese to the cream base and a touch of cayenne pepper.

The results were delicious!!! We would like to try this again sometime soon. We also were happy with the realization that this is a very cheap dish to make. All you need for the gnocchi are a few potatoes, flour and egg. There are all kinds of sauces you can add to the gnocchi, so we have a world of possibilities ahead of us!!!

We really enjoyed ourselves and think the Italians are onto something with these putsy dishes (risotto, gnocchi...). Making great food with someone you love on a Sunday afternoon is pretty awesome!!!

P.S. Here are the links to the recipes/tips we used!

http://www.101cookbooks.com/archives/how-to-make-gnocchi-like-an-italian-grandmother-recipe.html

http://www.marthastewart.com/recipe/gnocchi-with-mushrooms-and-gorgonzola-sauce

The REAL reason we went to D.C.

As you all may know from our last post, Chelsea and I were in Washington D.C. last weekend for the Teach for America 20th anniversary summit. As you also may know, we both really enjoy food, which was the biggest selling point when deciding whether or not to attend the summit... that and our school/TFA paid for it!! Our culinary adventures began in Indianapolis and their International airport.

We ate some really good burgers and I bought Chel and I some assorted chocolates from a chocolate shop nearby. The Indianapolis airport is really nice and the Delta terminal has good burgers. Our plane arrived at Reagan National at 2:00 p.m. We took a cab to our hotel, The Henley Park Hotel. The hotel was "very old, but charming", said Chelsea Barnes when asked for her comments about the hotel. We put our bags down, checked into the TFA Summit (the convention center was 3 minutes away from our hotel!!!) and went off to Matchbox D.C. You may remember Matchbox D.C. from our post about D.C. this summer. They have great pizza and luckily for us it was about 4 pm and we didn't have to wait in line. After dinner, we went back to the hotel and then to our evening sessions at the summit.

IDEA, the school we work for, provided us with money to attend the summit on one condition... that we help them recruit other teachers. We were expected to collect 15 contacts by the end of the summit (Chelsea collected 2, I collected 1). We also had to assist them in their booth at the job fair on Saturday that they had going on. Luckily, it was only for 30 minutes and we did an excellent job on selling IDEA.

Lunch on Saturday was supposed to include Chelsea, Miles, and myself. Miles bailed on us because "he forgot", so it was Chelsea and I. I was a terrible boyfriend on Saturday and miscalculated the distance between the convention center and Big Ben's Chili Bowl, D.C.'s number 1 place for Chili, http://www.benschilibowl.com/ordereze/default.aspx. It took us 20 minutes to get there, it was windy, and Chelsea was hungry. We finally arrived at Big Ben's... only to find out it is "cash only". (Chelsea would like to add that her dad's old adage about cash being a necessity when traveling was proved true on many occasions throughout the weekend. We have (again) learned our lesson.) Luckily, they have a restaurant next door named "Ben's Next Door", http://www.bensnextdoor.com/ordereze, (it's owned by the same people!) Ben's Next door had great wings! Chelsea ordered a delicious breakfast with a lot of bacon and I ordered Chicken and Waffles, a southern delicacy that I've never had in Texas.

We walked back happily to the convention center and missed our afternoon sessions (darn!). I was able to meet with the principal from the KIPP Colorado Schools and got some good news and bad news. The bad news was that the Data position was already taken. The good news is that he was looking for 5th grade math teachers and would like me to teach a model lesson to some of KIPP's students. I am still debating on whether or not to teach next year, but it's nice to know that there are options. I also applied to a position at CSU working with low-income high school students, advising them and their families on the college admissions process. Both jobs would interest me very much.

Saturday night we were both entertained and inspired by the closing session of the TFA summit. That night, Chelsea's cough (probably because of the windy walk to Ben's) was a little bad so we stayed in. We were supposed to go to a party hosted by IDEA but we opted for staying in and ordering room service burgers... best decision ever! We also watched "The Notebook". Side Note: We wanted to go to another Pizza place named, "We, The Pizza". It's owned and operated by Spike Mendelsohn, a Top Chef contestant. Long story short, Erin was at We the Pizza Saturday night AND SAW MICHELLE OBAMA!!!

Sunday we met up with Erin for Brunch at Ted's Bulletin. Its decor and theme is from the 30's and 40's, complete with a soda jerk. The menu is amazing. We waited for 2 hours and Chelsea was fading on us. Her antibiotics make her even more delightful to be around when she is on an empty stomach (Chelsea asked me to write this line in). Luckily, the hostess was nice enough to ask us if we were ok and I said "My girlfriend is sick, I think she's throwing up in the bathroom. She's really hungry. Could you help us get something small?" She got us a homemade pop tart that held Chel over (and she did not throw up- but learned her lesson about taking meds on an empty stomach). She ate a sloppy joe that was great. Erin had a chicken salad sandwich and I had a burrito.

Sunday night we celebrated Valentine's Day and Acqua Al 2. It was an Italian restaurant close to the Capitol in the Eastern Market neighborhood. Delicious is an understatement for their food. Our appetizer was Gnocchi with Gorgonzola Cream Sauce. We liked it so much that we are making it tonight!! For our entree we had filet mignon. Chelsea's was over a salad, mine was covered in blueberry sauce. For dessert we had a delicious cheese cake.

Our journey ended Monday. We were back in the RGV. Luckily, our students tested so Chel and I taught for only 2 days. My students did ok, they took an official State Assessment from 2009 to see how they would fare if they took their state test today. They did pretty well. (Side note from Chelsea- they did very well.)

We hope you enjoyed our post. We bought a griddle!! We will post about our breakfast today and the Gnocchi, hopefully later on tonight. We love you all!

TFA Summit

This past weekend Edwin and I went to good-ol' Washington D.C. for TFA's 20th Anniversary Summit. Knowing Edwin and me, we were most excited about the chance to eat great food, be in a city, and see friends (Erin)! The Summit was great too, though. Edwin chatted with some potential employers in Denver, I went to an informational panel on college access, and we saw some sweet famous people (Edwin was in a session with Malcolm Gladwell and Gloria Steinum). Here are some photos!!! I'm going to recruit Edwin to post about our culinary experiences in D.C.- we went to a mouth-watering Italian restaurant to celebrate Valentine's Day and it has inspired us to try making gnocchi this weekend. Stay tuned!!

We were excited to be there. Actually, at this moment we were waiting for John Legend to perform. Pretty pumped.

Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education, thinks TFA (and therefore Edwin and I) is great.

OOOO John Legend!!! He is a TFA Board Member (not to mention Grammy award winning performer). He sang 3 songs while backed up by a KIPP Middle School orchestra from NYC. It was pretty stellar. I'm sure it was the highlight of those kids' lives!!!

These kids were unflappable- not star struck or anything, just kept on playin.

B-ROCK made an appearance! Via pre-recorded message.

30 Degrees!!! Brace Yourselves!!!!

Temperatures have dropped to 30 degrees here in the Valley. People are FREAKING out. Donna ISD (a large school district here) closed school EARLY yesterday and is OFF today because it is 30 degrees. No, I am not kidding. I am trying to reserve judgement, but it is difficult. Attendance at our school is expected to be VERY low today- Edwin told them yesterday they would get hot chocolate for showing up. Just to highlight the contrast between normal weather here and the current temps- here is a frozen tree outside the Spanish classroom. The sprinkler stayed on, and it froze. Where am I.